Unalaska, AK – Tonight, representatives from the National Marine Fisheries Service and the Alaska Department of Fish and Game gather for the annual Bering Sea Crab Industry meeting in Anchorage. The purpose of the meeting is to go over the quotas for the various types of crab in the Bering Sea and then explain why those numbers are what they are.

But in Unalaska, there doesn't seem to be too many questions. The Department of Fish and Game announced the figures last week, and mostly, they're as fishermen expected. The quota for opilio crab went up 13% to 54.3 million pounds, and the total allowable catch for Bristol Bay red king crab this year is 14.8 million pounds which is a 7.5% drop from 2009. Jake Gull and Sean Rhodes are deckhands on the vessel the Bering Sea, and they say they're not shocked by that.

"We kind of expected it," says Gull. "We anticipated it after last year - we heard rumors that this was going to decline."

"Prices are supposed to be looking a lot better this year," adds Rhodes. "More money, but less quota, so I think we're going to be all right."

Gull and Rhodes think that there are a lot of different reasons for this price increase. They feel that Alaska wild seafood has become more marketable in recent years, and that people are especially looking out for it because the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has brought more attention to the importance of the fishing industry.

Jim Brady works on the vessel the Arctic Sea, and he agrees. He says that people think American prices for crab should go up, since they've been rising elsewhere.

"We expect them to go up, because of market conditions from what we've heard," says Brady. "Canada's supposedly getting a big price increase for their opilio, and we expect ours to be up, too."

Still there's some concern for the future. Last month, ADFG released its stock assessment, which found that male abundance is low, and biomass is down. But Gull and Rhodes are taking it one season at a time.

"You know it is fishing," Gull laughs. "So we pretty much come out here, take what we get, and we go home happy."

The crab season opens on October 15th.